Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plan to tax the wealthiest Americans 60-70% could bring in billions of extra dollars for the federal government

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has touted a plan that would tax the richest Americans at a rate as high as 70%.

She said the additional funds from the taxes would contribute to a massive overhaul plan to lower the country's carbon emissions to zero and eliminate fossil fuels in 10 years.

The newly elected lawmaker has been criticized for her proposed marginal income tax rate, which she said would affect Americans making more than $10 million a year.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has touted a marginal income tax rate of 60% to 70% for multimillionaire Americans to fund massive energy and infrastructure overhauls in a plan to lower the country's carbon emissions to zero and eliminate fossil fuels in 10 years.

"Once you get to the tippy-tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%," Ocasio-Cortez said. "That doesn't mean all 10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more."

Ocasio-Cortez pointed to past administrations — both Republican and Democratic — that implemented similar rates.

An analysis by The Washington Post found that if taxes on the approximately 16,000 Americans who earned more than $10 million in 2016 were raised to 70% from the 39.6% they paid that year, the federal government could bring in up to an extra $72 billion each year.

That would be enough to tackle other moves touted by Ocasio-Cortez over the proposed 10-year timeline of her green deal, including forgiving half of the $1.4 trillion in student-loan debt.

Though she hasn't specified a cost for the plan, Ocasio-Cortez has described the Green New Deal as an ambitious, all-encompassing movement toward cleaner energy across the country.

"The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan," she told HuffPost last year. "We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy."